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Monday, February 20, 2017

Essay: The plan ahead

It was a lot of internal changes to get multiple-combatants working, but I am happy that it is done and the core behavior is functioning as it should. There were a couple of bugs here and there but that's expected. All the reported bugs so far are fixed.

I understand team battles may not be everyone's thing, but it really does open up possibilities. For starters, group orgies wouldn't make sense without first allowing there to be more than one active opponents at once. But what's really exciting is that it allows the game to be free of the "wrestling match" constraint. For example, a side view beat-em-up mode or a third person dungeon crawler mode where the player can move from area to area encountering enemies along the way.

Back to the new girl. The plan is to release her in 3 patches.

The futa version will come first. The goal is to finish her hair, outfit and along with 8 new additional holds. Her combat abilities will be a copy of Wolfie's. In addition, there should be enough futa moves now to start generating randomized futa girls if the futa toggle is on.  My aim to to get this patch out by the end of this week or early next week.

The second patch will implement her own stance and combat abilities. I have some ambitious plans.

The third patch will implement her non-futa version and wrap up any loose ends. This should take us to around mid March.

After that, there are 2 path we can take.

The first is the conservative path to start working on the "story mode." The "story mode" setup is going to be very similar to 赤首の闘技場 (one of the better RPGMaker games, eng translation available). You will play as a MC and the game will have "turns." Each "turn" the player can choose from several actions such as "boss fight", "practice fight", "talk" or "training", etc (I suppose "prostitute yourself" is always a possibility too...). It is going to be more RPG-like than fighting game-like in the sense that you will be able to level up your character and do "quests" and "side-quests." These may affect the "ending" and may make "boss fights" easier or more difficult. Probably not going to implement walking around in "town" as that takes a lot of work to setup in 3D.

The "story mode" is very important to the game because it will finally give the game a sense of "purpose" and a much needed "core-gameplay-loop." The game currently feels more like a "sandbox" rather than a game. So it will be implemented no matter what. The question is whether or not to take a leap of faith and implement "adventure mode" in Heroine Rumble.

"Adventure mode" is what I described earlier with the dungeon-crawler/beat-em-up concept. No longer will we be confined to a wrestling match and we will be able to move from one area to the next. Instead of facing opponents who are equally strong as us, there will be mobs of the "Minion" class.

The "Minion" class is interesting because unlike the "Heroine" class, "Minions" do not perform holds on each other. Practically, this means that the "Minions" are not bound to use the "standard heroine skeleton" and can take any shape or form. So yes, that means tentacles, slime, dogs, non-humanoid, etc will all be possible.

"Adventure Mode" just seems like a natural extension of the engine and too juicy to be ignored. Whats unclear at the moment is whether to implement such a mode in Heroine Rumble or reserve it for a future title.

Anyways that is long enough of an essay so thats it for now.


4 comments:

  1. Any chance that the story mode will be mod-able? I'd love to use Heroine Rumble for some narrative designs.

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  2. Strong Suggestion - Do not add adventure mode to Heroine Rumble. If you want to proceed with it, reserve it for its own game.

    Heroine Rumble has already come a long way, and Story Mode (it sounds like a meaty campaign mode, which is a perfect fit) sounds like it will hit all of the right notes to give purpose to everything that exists in the game.

    'Adventure Mode' on the other hand, seems like it could be a bit of a weird addition to Heroine Rumble. Minion enemies would allow you to move further into fantasy territory, but it also starts to make the wrestling aspect itself a bit obsolete. It sounds like the kind of system that is well-suited to accommodating a faster style of gameplay, and if the enemies are slimes, tentacles, and other monsters, then I imagine the characters fighting them as knights, wizards, archers, and so on. The characters of Heroine Rumble, having been built around wrestling other human(oid) enemies, would seem rather out of place.

    More than anything, if you're going to pursue a different structure of gameplay, which it certainly seems would be the case, I'd personally much rather see Heroine Rumble find its identity, and then receive a great deal of polish as it approaches a final product. Incorporating an adventure mode into it risks muddying that identity, and also subjects the game to the possibility that it will be in development for an excessive amount of time before ever reaching 'completion'.

    The speed at which you've been able to develop Heroine Rumble (revealed to the public as Princess Clash this past September) has been unbelievable. Still, I'd rather see a strong of completed, concise game ideas than a single entity without any clarity of purpose.

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    Replies
    1. I dont intend to turn Heroine Rumble into a fantasy game. The thing about adventure mode is that I already have implemented most of its parts. It doesnt take much more extra effort to get a beat-em-up or third person dungeon crawler prototype to see how people like it.

      When I talk about "Minion" class I was more referring to its implementation than specific type of enemy. Minions could be humanoid as well, could use the same animation and model as the "Heroine" class. The main difference is how the grapple system is handled. The key recognition here is that if "Minions" can not grab other "Minions", then its feasible to try to use a (slightly) different skeleton rather just requiring everything to be in the same base skeleton.

      But yes, how much effort (if any) should be put into "Adventure Mode" is a open question and one that I am not sure myself.

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